Woolwich withdraws their 85% and shatters our hope of trading up

scof76

2 weeks ago, before accepting an offer on our 2-bed cottage on the market since December, we went to a Barclays branch (current mortgage provider) to see what they could do.

She told us that we could keep our SVR on the exisiting balance and take a new mortgage for the extra as long as we kept under 85% ltv, bringing the repayments just a tad higher than our current repayments (we'd kept our repayments the same despite the drop in base rate).

After getting the mortgage agreed on principle, accepting the offer on our house, getting our offer accepted on the property of our dream, we booked an appointment on Tuesday for today to process the application.

5 minutes in the meeting, she declares with a smile that Barclays has pulled their 85% mortgage on Wednesday and we need to find 12k to stay under 80%... impossible as we were maxed up to stay under the 85 already.

That left us outside the branch after 20 minutes with no mortgage and having to remortgage the full amount for £300 extra/ month than we had budgeted.
Is there anything we can do? Can they pull deals out like that without notice? Is this common practice?
We're gutted...

_Andy_

Yes they can pull the deal - as the application wasn't in, you hadn't secured the rate.
Unfortunate but nothing you can do.

scof76

Thanks for the reply. The SVR only consisted of 2/3 of the total mortgage and it would have taken a 4.25% increase in the rate to add £300 to the monthly repayments... not something that would have happened overnight.

Thanks for the advice of going for a fixed repayment mortgage, we're getting a broker to look at this for us as I type...